How Life Comes Today - The Wonderful Ritual

How Life Comes Today – A series of some of my more obsessive traits and obervations.

The Wonderful Ritual

It’s been a long day.  I’ve procrastinated long enough on my responsibility at work that I must now complete a week’s work in one day. Not to say I don’t work throughout the week but I leave the majority of my plate for a meeting-less day when I can throw on an a few albums and crank out the work items,  but while work place phenomena is a whole ritual in itself that is not the point of this particular entry.

But alas, I have made it to the Promised Land; I have made it home to what has been named ‘Where the Wild Things Live.’  After getting acquainted with the landscape and changing my clothes like Mr. Rogers.  Unbutton the shirt to be replaced with some nasty old shirt, replace the Jeans with Sweatpants, throw on a hoodie, and look the part.  That is when I begin the ritual, a small thing really. I locate the Tupperware which has been haphazardly strewn across the room.  There is no rhyme or reason why it does not have a permanent place but I know each day it is a scavenger hunt to locate it.  Once I have located it I have to dig through its contents.  The contents of which consist of empty plastic bags, loose cigarette filters, and a host of wraps in a variety of flavors and compositions, a few toothpicks, and a little plastic spoon.  My fingers flip through flavored wraps titled honey, strawberry-kiwi, grape, peach, and even more exotic varieties.  My favorites are these pure unbleached and unflavored wonders.  They roll right and stay together when you put them to the flame.  Some people insist on blunts or pipes but for me, if it’s not going in a bong it’s going to get rolled up in a joint, hence the excess of papers, and filters in the Tupperware.  A long time ago I forgot how to wrap a proper joint, so now I just use this fancy cigarette machine when I roll my joints. But I digress. 

Finally my fingers wrap themselves around a bag with something light and squishy inside.  The gold has been discovered without the help of a map.  I pull the bag out and measure the contents with my eyes.  Never as much as I would like but always enough and I slide my fingers in and pluck a decent sized bud out.  This particular treasure is a deep forest green with splotches of orange, with short bushy orange hairs.  I don’t know the name of this strain particularly, for whatever reason stoners need to create whimsical designations for what they smoke.  I myself never cared but I knew a girl once who used to always ask me to describe what it was that I was smoking and would try to piece together what it was.  We still talk every once and a while but she doesn’t ask and we never hang out due to other complications.  The bud is floral, it’s spongy, it’s dank and the smell permeates the room as soon as I open the bag.  I am used to my room smelling of such and I never have to light incenses.  Sometimes, I will light some fragrant candles, but those only highlight the perfume.

Once I have selected the particular bud for consumption, it’s off to find the grinder.  Much like the Tupperware it is always hard to locate.  Is it in the kitchen?  Perhaps it is on the coffee table, on the counter, by the pool table, on top of the aquarium, in my room?  No one knows and I am sure it will take me at least fifteen minutes to locate the little black cylinder.  Grinding is an important part of my Wonderful Ritual.  Not everyone does it, you don’t have to if it is going in a pipe or a bong but it does give you more bang for your buck, creates a mellower smoke, and is a more balanced burn which is important in these endeavors.   The grinder itself is a simple and elegant machine drilled cylinder.  When you hold it you can feel where the machine has carved its existence from a block of Aluminum.  The machine is precise but still leaves milling rings along its short black exterior.  The grinder itself has three chambers.  The first is what does all of the heavy lifting in the process and is where the raw bud goes in.  It has metal prongs on the lid and on the base, once the lid is fitted; the bud is squished between these prongs.  Once sealed you simply turn the lid and the prongs shred the bud into mulch.  Holes drilled at the bottom of the chamber allow the mulch to feed down into the second chamber.  The second chamber has two uses, one of which is optional.  Its primary use is to capture the mulch as a repository.  The floor of the second chamber is a screen and if used in tandem with a disk, like a nickel, you can actually shake the grinder with the mulch around and force small mulch particulates through the screen.  The particles are pure THC, the active ingredient everyone’s always clamoring about and is held in the third chamber.   At this point it is time to find the Bong which is just as difficult as finding the Tupperware and the grinder.  Curse my bones; did I leave it outside again?  The landlord does not like when I leave my bong out amongst the wild.  It’s a fair request but one I am terrible with.  One of my roommates prefers the three foot monstrosities built for indulging a group of people, while I myself prefer a more manageable ‘solo occupant’ approach to my utensils.  I played around with a few but have finally settled on this piece I got in Montana.  It’s about 10 inches from the bottom of the water-chamber to the top of the spout.  It is glass, simple, and dare I say elegant? There really isn’t much color on it save a few green lines that circle the water-chamber and a few more at the top spout.  I don’t know who decided that glass bongs should be clear but cleaning the damn things is always a nightmare and there just is not a good option for cleaning them.  Instead the expended carbon just sits on the bottom or coagulates on the rim of the water-chamber, a real nightmare.

 The best way I have found to fill what is commonly called the ‘bowl’ is to remove the piece itself and hold it over the first opened cylinder while I use a pinching mechanic to shuffle mulch into the bowl piece.  I do this so that if I drop it anywhere while trying to fill, it just falls back into its home to be pinched again.  Every time I skip this step of my Wonderful Ritual I leave green confetti everywhere and depending on my state of mind when I find it, it may or may not be cleaned up adequately.  Once it’s loaded it is spongy and loose so I use the back of a pen, or any other flat cylindrical surface to pack it down.  Not so tight that I can’t get a good draw, but enough to create a thick wonderful white smoke without torching the entire face.  This is a lot of technical jargon for something that is pretty easy and I am probably going over board, but it’s my Wonderful Ritual.

Once packing is complete I hit the deck, we don’t smoke inside, but we do however have an outside gas fed fire with an assortment of uncomfortable chairs.  If I am alone on my endeavor I will pull up two chairs to create a haphazard place to recline.  It’s only comfortable for a limited time but as soon as I complete the Wonderful Ritual I can sit, statue like, staring at the sky or the trees or whatever.  All while being serenaded by the speaker box which is belting out whatever designation I or my roommates choose.  Rarely is there something to complain about.          

The Wonderful Ritual is about to close.  I am an addict.  I know what’s coming and while it might not be as exaggerated as other drugs, I look forward to it.  Knowing I am an addict means that I also know this is all I get.  I know my boundaries and I know what I am comfortable with.  I know that shifting to anything harder would be my doom and the destruction of everything I have built my life on.  I also know that one day I will have to give up my Wonderful Ritual.  So today I get to indulge. 

I close my eyes and take a deep breath.  As I release that breadth I flick the green Bic in my hand to create a small adequate flame and lower that to the top of the bowl.  The mulch turns black, peels, and turns into a little ember as I suck through the spout.  I suck lightly, enough to create a vacuum which pulls the smoke from the bowl and into the water chamber where I am rewarded with a bubbling sound as the smoke rises and coils around the spout.  Another deep breadth but this time instead of pulling clean air I pull the thick white smoke into my lungs and let it simmer.  Cigarette smoke is blue grey mess that hangs in the air, when you pull of a cigarette you pull it into your mouth and mix it with air as you inhale.  Smoking a cigarette is two part mechanic, a draw from the cigarette and then a draw of oxygen into your mouth.   Smoking Marijuana is different; it’s a direct draw system.  Some people seem convinced that the longer you hold it in the better but the reality is that your lungs pull the majority of what they will get in three seconds.  Anything longer than that won’t do much except make it more likely that you will cough strait for the next five minutes.

Some strains I can feel right away, creeping through my body and then my brain as my body reacts to the THC.  Other strains need to mellow and as they do so you get a slow steady affect.  It’s not a hallucinogen, it’s not a psychedelic.  Every strain is different and so are the effects but the one universal is the elevated feeling.  Your brain is still processing information it is just doing so through a filter.

Exhaling towards the stars, my Wonderful Ritual is complete.